In order to improve the quality of systematic researches, various tools have been developed by well-known scientific institutes sporadically. Dr. Nader Ale Ebrahim has collected these sporadic tools under one roof in a collection named “Research Tool Box”. The toolbox contains over 720 tools so far, classified in 4 main categories: Literature-review, Writing a paper, Targeting suitable journals, as well as Enhancing visibility and impact factor.

Tuesday, 29 November 2016

Increase your research impact

In the academic world research impact is very important.

Research impact is taken into
account when research groups are being evaluated formally by the
Standard Evaluation Protocols (SEP), but also when your own your
academic work or career is being evaluated for funding, promotion or
appointments.

Researchers use different
strategies to improve their (potential) research impact in all phases of
the publishing process. They may be applied during the pre-print phase
(while planning, writing and choosing journals to publish in), but also
in the post-print phase (after the article or study is published), and
both are important.

Increase your research impact

Strategies to increase the likelihood of an article being cited,
discussed or otherwise mentioned in scientific and relevant societal
groups.

Pre-print phase

In the pre-print phase you may think about:

Research topics with a high potential academic and/or societal
relevance, and if a literature review is needed to prove the relevance,
get your research proposal approved, and/or ensure research funding or
grants.

Publishing a review as an independent publication, even if it forms
part of a planned follow up article or study. You can earn double
credits when the follow up gets published as well.

Choosing peer-reviewed journals with a high Journal Impact Factor (JIF) to increase the likelihood to get cited

Although search engine optimisation (SEO) is usually associated with
websites and webpages, scientific articles can be optimised as well

Post-print phase

Writing and publishing your scholarly article is not the final step.
To maximise your research impact you must inform everyone in your
academic and social networks about it as well. Strategies to use in the
post-print phase:

Use social media to discuss your article or study, focussing on special interest groups

Journal Impact Factor - JIF

A traditional indicator to choose a journal to publish your article is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF).

A number indicating the average amount of times articles from the
journal are cited in a specified period of time. The higher the Impact
Factor of a Journal, the bigger the chance that your article will be
read and/or cited. When there is a choice between different journals to
publish in, you may choose the journal with the higher Journal Impact
Factor.

Although this reasoning seems sound, keep in mind that:

The JIF is based on the arithmetic mean number of citations per
paper, yet citation counts follow a Bradford distribution (i.e., a power
law distribution). Therefore the arithmetic mean is a statistically
inappropriate measure to express the importance of any one publication,
and will be different from, and in most cases less than, the overall
number

Journal ranking lists can differ considerably from JIF-rankings when other impact measures are used, such as the ‘Eigenfactor’ score, the ‘SJR indicator’, or when based upon expert opinion

The strength of the relationship between impact factors of journals
and the citation rates of the papers therein is steadily decreasing
since articles began to be available digitally

A journal can adopt editorial policies to increase its impact factor, and

An institutional repository, such as UM Publications
(a post-print service for already published articles so that this
research becomes widely available and discoverable via tools like
Google)

Other factors to consider – next to the speed of dissemination - when choosing a journal are:

Institutional self-archiving policy to store and disseminate articles and other publications through the institutional repository

The publisher’s copyright policy and business model (see below: SHERPA/RoMEO)

The author or article processing charges of the journal (see below: SHERPA/RoMEO)

Knowing that citation databases, such as the Web of Science or
Scopus, are (and will be) used to determine research impact a lot of
researchers choose OA Journals which are also indexed in citation
databases, i.e. those established long enough to have an impact factor or otherwise qualified for inclusion.

Where to find OA Journals and publisher policies?

SHERPA/RoMEO:
This directory lists publisher copyright and self-archiving policies.
Listings also indicate whether or not the publisher has a "paid access"
option with direct links to the specific publisher policies on paid
access. See also the UM Copyright information point for some guidance on copyright issues before and after publishing.

Open access articles can also often be found with a web search, using
any general search engine or those specialised for the scholarly and
scientific literature, such as OAIster and Google Scholar.

OA Journals with a Journal Impact Factor in a specified discipline can be found by using the Web of Science.

Many funding agencies support open access. For a list of research funders' open access policies, consult SHERPA/Juliet.

Subject or institutional repositories

An easy way to maximise the exposure of published articles, books or
book chapters, and get citations, is to post them to subject or
institutional repositories. Such as:

An institutional repository, such as UM Publications
(a post-print service for already published articles so that this
research becomes widely available and discoverable via tools like
Google)

By posting your publication to repositories it becomes widely
available and discoverable via tools like Google and Google Scholar.

To prevent copyright issues when uploading or posting articles to
subject or institutional repositories, or to pre-print services, check:

Your publisher’s copyright transfer agreement or licence

SHERPA/RoMEO:
This directory lists publisher copyright and self-archiving policies.
Listings also indicate whether or not the publisher has a "paid access"
option with direct links to the specific publisher policies on paid
access.

Optimising articles for search-engines (SEO)

Although search engine optimisation (SEO) is usually associated with
websites and webpages, scientific articles can be optimised as well
(ASEO; Academic Search Engine Optimisation).

Not only to ensure that articles are found (crawled) and indexed, but
also to influence the position where the articles are displayed in the
results list. Just like any other type of ranked search results,
articles displayed in top positions are more likely to be read and
cited.

Visibility and Research Impact, 22.09.2016, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. Munich

Bibliometrics, Scholarly Communication and Publication Strategies

What is my research impact and how can I influence my h-index? How
can I use academic identity management and social media for improving my
presence on the internet? The course gives an overview of different
issues with scholarly publication and improvement of research impact.

Kudos: Improving the Reachability and Research Impact

You
need tools to disseminate the research findings and publications and
make sure that the high quality work of your research, reaches to the
widest possible audience outside of your academic research discipline.
Kudos is one of the service that provides tools for researchers to
maximize the visibility and reach of their published papers. Kudos
provides a new way for authors to use social media to engage the digital
community with their research. By creating 'profiles' for their
published articles and adding short titles, lay summaries, impact
statements and supplementary content, authors can make their articles
more engaging for a digital readership.

Friday, 25 November 2016

This Web-based service helps researchers maximize the visibilityand impact of their published articles. The Kudos platform allows you to make your work more accessible and discoverable, and provides tools to measure the effect of your impact enhancement activities.

Kudos features an ORCID integration ,
so importing your publications into Kudos is quick and easy.

To find out more and get started using the Kudos toolkit to increase the impact of your research, check out our :

Since HKBU’s launch of the institutional adoption of ORCID at the beginning of 2015, more than two-thirds of our faculty have shown their support by signing up and connecting their ORCID to our online system.

With more publishers and research services making use of ORCID iDs,
our faculty will be well-placed to take advantage. Furthermore, they can
enjoy
the benefits of the ORCID Update Service provided by the RVP team.

New publication information submitted to the Graduate School will be
automatically passed to the RVP team for addition to your ORCID account.

As a blogger, author of a book, chapter or article; it should come as
no surprise that we look to find ways to increase readership. This
morning whilst researching for a project I am working on, I came across
an article by Professor Christine Pascale
who provides a list of tips for researchers and authors to improve
research visibility and impact. Whilst this focuses on research, many of
the tips can easily be applied to any form of writing you wish to
share. It could be your blog about poetry or a book you have written.

In the list below I have added in red some additional suggestions of my own and hyperlinked the social media sites that are suggested.

Christine’s top tips for researchers and authors

Publicise yourself and your research; for example, put a message and hyperlink to the article in your Email signature box.

Include a link to your blog or Amazon listing.

Write a review, reviews are more likely to be cited than original research papers.

Consider writing a review of another author’s work in your own blog.

Promote and present your work at conferences, with colleagues and
through your student body. Persuade the organizers of a meeting or
conference to make publicly available the presentations made at
meetings; not just the published abstracts.

Include links to your work on the final slide. Upload your presentation to Slideshare, which is an excellent space for people to share, like and comment upon your work.

Set up a web site devoted to your work and research projects and
post links to manuscripts of publications, conference abstracts, and
supplemental materials such as images, illustrations, slides, specimens,
and progress reports on the site.

Tools likeWordPressandBloggermake
this very easy and can be set up at static pages just like a website.
Including visible sharing buttons on your site enables readers to share
what they have read with others.

Ideas travel through networks and relationships. Build on these and be opportunistic.

You may want to include#hashtagsfor
keywords that relate to your work. For example blogging about social
media in higher education, I might include #HigherEd #socialmedia.

Take advantage of SEO (search engine optimization) tips to enhance
retrieval of your research project web site by search engines. Work with
your webmaster to make sure your web page titles describe the content
of the web page and include the name of your research project. Include
meta tags in the page header section that include appropriate keywords
to describe the content of the page. Search engines look at this
“hidden” content and use it to determine search results page rankings.

When writing a blog post
think about the title and consider the search terms people may use to
locate information about your topic or specialism and include these
words.

Research is not just text and figures. Create a podcast describing the research project and submit the podcast to YouTube or Vimeo.

You may also want to considerAudioBooorSoundCloudwhich are social sites for sharing audio.

Sign up for other social networking sites to increase your visibility and connect with colleagues. Some useful sites are ResearcherID or LinkedIn. Sites such as Nature Network
allow and encourage interaction between users. Social network tools
provide a forum for disseminating your research, promoting discussion of
your work, sharing scientific information, and forming new
collaborations.

Consider joining groups or setting up your own in LinkedIn to discuss your own subject specialisms.Cloudworks is a space to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences.ScribdandIssuuare digital documents libraries that allow users to publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents.

For further ideas on how to develop
the use of social media you may wish to look at a presentation I gave at
the University of Roehampton on Social Media and the Digital Scholar which is available on Slideshare.

Create
Discovery Metadata to improve research visibility - See more at:
http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/researchdataman/describe/discovery_metadata.html#sthash.n7XyiveZ.dpuf

Create Discovery Metadata to improve research visibility

Publishing
information that describes the content of your research can enhance its
visibility within the academic community, making it easier for others
to learn about, cite, and use. This page explains how discovery metadata
may be used in your research.

What is discovery metadata?

At a basic level, metadata is data about data - information
associated with a resource that describes one or more attributes.
Discovery metadata refers to the subset of information that is necessary
to help researchers to locate data of relevance using a search engine
or online catalogue.

What type of resource should it be applied to?

Metadata can be associated with any type of data. However, in the
context of research datasets, three types of resource are relevant.

What metadata should be created?

When documenting data, it is useful to consider the question, “What information would I need to be able to find, understand, and use this data in 5 years?”. Relevant information includes the following:

Title: The title of the work

Grant Number: The grant no. for the project

Description: A paragraph that describes the content. This may be the same as the abstract

Creator: One or more people responsible for the data’s creation

Contributors: Other people who contributed to the data’s development

Completion date: The date of finalisation/last update

Rights: Ownership and other rights associated with the data

Access Restrictions: Restrictions or other controls that must be imposed upon the data, e.g. academic use only.

Temporal coverage: The start and end date of the data collection or other activity

Spatial coverage: The geographic region in which data
collection or other activities was performed. This may be referenced as
a geographic region or using an spatial reference system.

- See more at: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/researchdataman/describe/discovery_metadata.html#sthash.n7XyiveZ.dpuf

Create Discovery Metadata to improve research visibility

Publishing information that describes the content of your
research can enhance its visibility within the academic community, making it
easier for others to learn about, cite, and use. This page explains how
discovery metadata may be used in your research.

What is discovery metadata?

At a basic level, metadata is data about data - information associated with
a resource that describes one or more attributes. Discovery metadata refers to
the subset of information that is necessary to help researchers to locate data
of relevance using a search engine or online catalogue.

What type of resource should it be applied to?

Metadata can be associated with any type of data. However, in the context of
research datasets, three types of resource are relevant.

What metadata should be created?

When documenting data, it is useful to consider the question, “What
information would I need to be able to find, understand, and use this data in 5
years?”. Relevant information includes the following:

Title: The title of
the work

Grant Number: The
grant no. for the project

Description: A
paragraph that describes the content. This may be the same as the abstract

Creator: One or more
people responsible for the data’s creation

Contributors: Other
people who contributed to the data’s development

Completion date: The
date of finalisation/last update

Rights: Ownership and
other rights associated with the data

Access Restrictions:
Restrictions or other controls that must be imposed upon the data, e.g.
academic use only.

Temporal coverage: The
start and end date of the data collection or other activity

Spatial coverage: The
geographic region in which data collection or other activities was
performed. This may be referenced as a geographic region or using an
spatial reference system.

- See more at:
http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/researchdataman/describe/discovery_metadata.html#sthash.n7XyiveZ.dpuf

Create Discovery Metadata to improve research visibility

Publishing
information that describes the content of your research can enhance its
visibility within the academic community, making it easier for others
to learn about, cite, and use. This page explains how discovery metadata
may be used in your research.

What is discovery metadata?

At a basic level, metadata is data about data - information
associated with a resource that describes one or more attributes.
Discovery metadata refers to the subset of information that is necessary
to help researchers to locate data of relevance using a search engine
or online catalogue.

What type of resource should it be applied to?

Metadata can be associated with any type of data. However, in the
context of research datasets, three types of resource are relevant.

What metadata should be created?

When documenting data, it is useful to consider the question, “What information would I need to be able to find, understand, and use this data in 5 years?”. Relevant information includes the following:

Title: The title of the work

Grant Number: The grant no. for the project

Description: A paragraph that describes the content. This may be the same as the abstract

Creator: One or more people responsible for the data’s creation

Contributors: Other people who contributed to the data’s development

Completion date: The date of finalisation/last update

Rights: Ownership and other rights associated with the data

Access Restrictions: Restrictions or other controls that must be imposed upon the data, e.g. academic use only.

Temporal coverage: The start and end date of the data collection or other activity

Spatial coverage: The geographic region in which data
collection or other activities was performed. This may be referenced as
a geographic region or using an spatial reference system.

8

achievements

Open Access

Top 10%

98% of your research is free to read online.This level of availability puts you in the top 4% of researchers.

Even
better, 52% of your papers are published under a fully Open license
like CC-BY, making them available for a wide range of reuse (not just
reading). Learn more about why this is important at HowOpenIsIt.

Your writing has a reading level that is easily understood at grade 9 and above, based on its abstracts and titles.That's great — it helps lay people and practitioners use your research. It also puts you in the top 3% in readability.

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About Me

Nader Ale Ebrahim has
a Technology Management PhD degree from the Department of Engineering
Design and Manufacture, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya
(UM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He holds a Master of Science in the
mechanical engineering from University of Tehran, Iran.